28 out Power Up your Classes with Youtube Videos

There´s nothing new on the use of Youtube for learning, but how often do you use its features beyond watching the videos?

I´d like to suggest three ways to enhance the use of Youtube videos in the classroom.

First, encourage your group to create a collaborative playlist about the topic they are studying. By doing that, the students are watching, analyzing and making decisions about the best option to add to the grupo playlist. How do you do it?

Start a Playlist on Youtube by choosing a video and clickin on the + button just below it.

Then, you have the option of making it collaborative and share the link with your learners so that they can add videos to the class playlist. Do you want to give it a try? How about adding your own video to our Rethinking Education playlist?

My second tip to power up the use of Youtube for learning purposes is to use the transcript feature. Did you know that students can read on the side as they watch it? It is not the subtitles. It is a full transcript! It gives them a much more thorough view of what is being said in an uncluttered way. And you can even use parts of the transcript by copying and pasting to do some class activities like stating what came first or after that part of the transcript; or ask the students to pick a sentence and then expand it in written form or discuss it with peers the meaning of that part.

To activate the transcript, click on the three dots … on the right bottom corner of the video.

Then, you have it on the right side of the video:

And my third highlight goes to videos that are graphically appealing to students and that they can easily pick the concepts through the images, like in the TED-ED videos and RSA. Don´t miss the chance to explore what is outstanding and of high quality on Youtube. With the TED-ED videos, for example, you can have ready-to-use lesson plans and you can also create your lesson plan and make them available to other educators around the globe. Or how about inviting your students to help you create a lesson plan to other students?

Any other ideas you´ve tried in your own classroom that go beyond simply watching a video? Or any channels worth exploring for English Learning?

Carla Arena is a social entrepreneur, educator by choice. She left a promising career in the public service to become an English teacher and got the chance to take roles she could have never imagined, such as site content manager at the Binational Center she worked for, Casa Thomas Jefferson. There, she was also the Supervisor of Educational Technology, and more recently Coordinator of Innovation and Technologies. Carla is a Google Innovator and educational technology consultant. Currently she innovates in her own business, AMPLIFICA (https://amplifica.org).